


Armor

by paperstorm



Series: Somewhere In Brooklyn [3]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Brooklyn, Established Bucky Barnes/Steve Rogers, M/M, POV: Bucky Barnes, Pre-Captain America: The First Avenger, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Pre-War, Romance, Sickfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-15
Updated: 2019-03-15
Packaged: 2019-11-18 17:22:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18124244
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperstorm/pseuds/paperstorm
Summary: Steve has a coughing fit; Bucky helps.





	Armor

Bucky is exhausted by the time he gets home from work. He usually is, but today was especially tiring. They’d unloaded heavy crates off a freighter for hours, barely breaking for enough time to gulp down the sandwich he’d brought before they were hollered at to get back to it. Some kind of deadline that had to be met for some rich fat-cat who’d probably never lifted anything heavier in his life than a stack of paper bills. Why his emergency was their problem, Bucky didn’t know or ask. They need the money, always, so he follows orders when he gets them. He’s sweaty and covered in grime by the time he hauls his ass up the stairs and into their apartment. Next time they have a bit of cash to spare, they’re moving to a place on the second floor of a building. The ground floor isn’t safe, but the fourth floor is excessive. It’s just more stairs to climb every day of his life, carrying furniture when they moved in or groceries every Saturday or just his own tired limbs at the end of a long day.  
   
Steve is already home when Bucky opens the door. He can hear him moving around in the kitchen, the clamour of pots and pans mixed with the sound of him coughing. His lungs have been bad, the last few days. There was a factory fire over the weekend, not too far from where they live, and it’s been a hot and muggy and still July week and the air hasn’t cleared up yet. It won’t, until the humidity breaks and the wind changes.  
   
Steve cooks more often than Bucky does. He feels badly about that, sometimes, because Steve isn’t his wife and he doesn’t deserve to always be stuck with the domestic duties. But Bucky works longer hours than Steve does, and his job is more physical, so other times he’s just grateful to come home most days to food on the table that he didn’t have to prepare himself. Bucky always, always does the dishes, even when Steve argues him about it, so he figures they’re almost even.  
   
He locks up behind himself and gets his shoes off because they’re muddy. He notices mud on his socks, too, so he peels them off and tosses them vaguely in the direction of the bedroom. He walks with damp feet across the living room toward the kitchen at the back of the apartment, finding Steve stirring a wooden spoon into a pot on the stove with one hand and covering his mouth with the other so he doesn’t cough right into their dinner.  
   
“How bad has it been?” Bucky asks sympathetically, leaning against the doorframe and watching the coughs shake Steve’s shoulders.  
   
“It’s fine,” Steve says, predictably. He doesn’t even look up from whatever he’s stirring. It smells like chicken broth.  
   
“Should we call Dr. Brown again?”  
   
“And hear what back?” Steve sighs and looks over briefly, but avoids making eye contact. “I’m not sick, Buck. It’s the smoke, it’ll stop once the haze clears. Just have to wait it out.”  
   
“You know you were hacking for almost an hour last night, at three in the morning.”  
   
“Sorry. I was trying not to wake you up, I’ll … if it happens again tonight I’ll go out onto the fire escape.”  
   
“So you can wake someone else up and get the cops called on you?” Bucky sighs too. He walks further into the room, side-stepping their small table and getting in behind Steve. He wraps his arms around the thin waist and bends, draping himself over Steve and hugging him. “S’not my point, Steve. I don’t care that you woke me up, I care that it was three a.m. and you couldn’t breathe and you won’t go to the doctor.”  
   
“We don’t have money for me to go to the doctor just to hear that there’s nothing he can do about it,” Steve argues. He isn’t angry, though. He sounds as tired as Bucky feels, and he leans back against him. And regretful. Like he thinks he’s a burden – which he does, constantly, even though he isn’t. “We gotta save for the next time I’m really sick.”  
   
“Don’t jinx it.”  
   
“Jinxes aren’t real.” Steve resumes stirring, and Bucky looks over his shoulder at what’s in the pot. It is chicken soup, golden yellow simmering along with celery and onions and spices.  
   
“Smells really good.”  
   
“You don’t,” Steve replies.  
   
Bucky laughs. “Sorry.”  
   
“Hard day?”  
   
“Yeah, I’m gonna be sore tomorrow.” Bucky kisses the side of Steve’s face, and squeezes him before he lets go. “I’ll go get cleaned up, don’t start without me.”  
   
“I’ll start when I wanna start,” he hears Steve grumble as he heads to the bathroom, but there’s no real heat to it. Steve just, as a matter of principle, balks at being told what to do in any and all circumstances.  
   
Bucky showers, watching brown water mixed with soap suds surround his feet at the base of the porcelain tub and then wash away down the drain. He hurries, because their hot water runs out fast and maybe if he plays his cards right he can convince Steve to soak in a hot bath later. It might help with the cough. Sarah used to do something with steam and some kind of oil to help soothe his chest when Steve was little. Bucky should have asked her to explain it to him before she died, because Steve doesn’t remember it either. They weren’t expecting her to be gone as soon as she was. There are a lot of things Bucky would have liked her to know before she went on to the next world. He loves his own family but he isn’t sure how they’d react if they knew the things he and Steve get up to behind closed doors, and he can’t take the risk. He feels fairly certain Sarah would have understood, and he’ll always regret that they didn’t tell her. Bucky’s not totally sure he believes what Father Kennedy told them from behind the pulpit all those Sunday mornings, but if there is a heaven he hopes Sarah is looking down on them, proud of the way Bucky’s taking care of her son. The idea means more to him than he’d be willing to admit.  
   
He comes out of the bathroom naked, amongst a cloud of steam, and heads to the bedroom for a fresh change of clothes. Their apartment is as sticky and overheated as the rest of the city is right now, so he settles on underwear and an old t-shirt and nothing else. Steve isn’t at the stove anymore when Bucky makes his way back to the kitchen, but he can hear coughing and it takes Bucky a moment to notice Steve on the other side of the room, on the floor. He’s on his knees, one hand clutching the handle on the door of the refrigerator, coughing so violently it shakes his whole frame.  
   
“Jesus, Steve!” Bucky yells, and hurries to him, helping him up and getting him over to a chair. Steve bends over the table on his elbows, still shaking as he tries to hold the coughs in, his breaths wheezing and rattling. Bucky pats him on the back, but then stops immediately when he remembers Steve isn’t choking on food and that won’t help. “Breathe, pal, you gotta breathe.”  
   
“Thanks, I hadn’t figured that out,” Steve snaps.  
   
Bucky hovers over him, his hand gently squeezing the back of Steve’s beck, and ignores the sarcastic jab. “It’s just a fit, you just gotta relax. C’mon, slow breaths.”  
   
After a moment it does lessen. Steve still coughs but not like he’s about to die at any moment or cough so hard one of his organs will burst.  
   
Bucky closes his eyes against the sting behind them, refusing to let tears even entertain the idea of falling. It is not the time for him to be weak. Not when Steve needs him to be strong. He leans over, draping himself over Steve from behind again.  
   
“I’m fine,” Steve asserts. He isn’t, and they both know he isn’t, but he can never help himself.  
   
“Come sit on the couch with me,” Bucky says, rubbing his nose up Steve’s cheek.  
   
“Why?” Steve asks. He sputters a little over the word, and it’s a pointless question. He knows why.  
   
Bucky knows he does. Steve is just going to make him say it, so he can argue about it. He’s too stubborn for his own good sometimes. Most times. “Let me rub your back. Make it better.”  
   
As was entirely foreseeable, Steve grumbles about it. “Don’t need you do to that.”  
   
The weight of his words are undercut by a sharp inhale that rattles like leaky pipes in his lungs.  
   
“Steve.”  
   
“I know it’s bad tonight. Doesn’t mean I need you lookin’ after me like I’m a little kid.”  
   
“We look after each other. Don’t we?” Bucky counters, being gentle about it. He understands Steve’s resistance, but it really will be better if Steve just gives in. When he curls up in Bucky’s lap and lets Bucky rub his back, it relaxes him and helps him breathe easier. They both know it.  
   
“The soup,” Steve mumbles, half-heartedly.  
   
“The soup will be fine. I’ll turn it down and it can wait twenty minutes, it ain't gonna get ruined.”  
   
“I guess.”  
   
Bucky changes tactics, and never knows why he doesn’t start here in the first place. It’s always the thing that works, in the end. He shakes Steve’s shoulders lightly. “I won’t be able to sleep a wink with you wheezing next to me all night. You already kept me up last night. So c’mon, let me help or you’re sleepin’ in the tub.”  
   
He’s lying. Steve knows he’s lying. That isn’t the point. It’s letting Steve keep a little of that closely guarded pride; giving him a reason to be doing it for Bucky, instead of himself. Steve is really hopeless at doing things for himself, but he’ll rip himself in half to help someone else.  
   
“Fine,” Steve agrees, with an extra loud sigh for emphasis, that has him coughing again.  
   
Bucky smiles and keeps the  _I told you so_  to himself.   
   
He does turn down the element on the stove, and takes a scowling Steve over to the couch in the living room. He sits in the corner of it, getting his heels up onto the coffee table and helping Steve settle down on top of him, curled into his chest. Steve sits stiffly just for a moment; stays stubborn just for a minute or two but then it wavers as Bucky’s hand rubs, slowly, up and down his back. The knobs of his spine bump under Bucky’s fingers. He keeps it steady, light pressure, rubbing in small, soothing circles. In minutes Steve’s breathing evens out and he relaxes in Bucky’s arms.  
   
“That’s better,” Bucky whispers to him. He runs his nose through the soft hair on top of Steve’s head, the blond strands tickling his chin. “Get yourself all worked up, sometimes, babydoll. Makes it worse.”  
   
“You don’t need to be smug about it. That makes it worse too,” Steve mutters, but all the venom is gone.  
   
Bucky trails the fingers of his other hand up Steve’s arm, over his bicep and then back down, light enough to leave goose-bumps on Steve’s skin in their wake. He does it again, to watch the tiny way Steve shivers and leans a little more heavily against Bucky. His legs tuck up a little further, curling himself into a ball in Bucky’s lap. Bucky kisses his hair and rests his cheek on the top of Steve’s head.  
   
“Do I smell okay now?” he asks.  
   
Steve pushes his face into Bucky’s neck, and Bucky feels his lips curve into a smile. “Yeah,” he says softly. “You smell good.”  
   
“If I could,” Bucky tells him, “I’d take you away from here. Take you South, to the ocean. Away from the city smog and the dirt and the exhaust. Somewhere with lots of trees, somewhere we could see the stars better than here.”  
   
“Wouldn’t fix my lungs,” Steve says.  
   
“I wish I could.”  
   
Steve’s lips are moist against Bucky’s neck, and then he tucks his face into Bucky’s chest, inhaling and breathing him in. “I know. I’m okay, Buck. I can handle it.”  
   
“I know you can handle it. Doesn’t mean you should have to.”  
   
Steve lifts his head, and there’s a small smile on his face when he looks up at Bucky. He’s so beautiful, sometimes Bucky can’t stand it. The bright blue of his eyes, the way his hair falls into his face, the sunshine that radiates off him when he’s happy. When Bucky makes him happy. It’s Bucky’s favorite thing in the entire world, knowing he’s put that pretty smile on Steve’s face.  
   
“Feelin’ better?” he whispers, bringing his hand up to cup Steve’s cheek.  
   
Steve nods, and tilts his chin forward for a kiss. Bucky gives it to him gladly, sliding his lips over Steve’s slow and soft and heartfelt.  
   
“You hungry?” Steve murmurs against his mouth.  
   
“Let’s just sit here another minute.”  
   
“I’m okay, now.”  
   
“Maybe I want you in my lap a little while longer. Not everything’s about you, Rogers.” Bucky pokes him gently, and Steve laughs softly and snuggles back in. Bucky wraps his arms around Steve’s smaller body, keeping him close, and closes his eyes. He’s loved having Steve against him since they were five years old. He loves it for different reasons, now, but at the same time the reasons that have been there all along. He can’t snap his fingers and get rid of Steve’s ailments and his heart murmur and his tendency to catch pneumonia every January when the cold seeps in through their old drafty windows. He can’t do that, but he can hold Steve close to him and love him straight through all that, even when Steve fights him every step of the way. He understands why Steve fights. Lucky for both of them, Bucky fights back.

**Author's Note:**

> [come talk to me on tumblr if you want!](http://paper-storm.tumblr.com/)


End file.
